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no ads in rss feed for premium members?

03-17-2009, 10:51 AM

hi,

since I primarily read my news through a news feeder, I would be interested to know if ads will disappear when becoming premium member and what would be the status of full text rss feed for premium members (I read it was being considered).

I'm currently working on a way to make this happen. Since the RSS feed is over at FeedBurner / Google, I can't easily inject some checks to see if the user is a premium member or not. However, I hope to have a solution soon where Premium Members will be able to go to a different URL and if they are a member it will show the feed.

Comment

Does RSS even have any kind of identification/authentication mechanism? *too lazy to check*

RSS itself is just an XML format for which news is delivered. The RSS is generated by PHP and that's where there would be a check to see if there is a Phoronix Forums log-in session or if something else is set.

Comment

I'm currently working on a way to make this happen. Since the RSS feed is over at FeedBurner / Google, I can't easily inject some checks to see if the user is a premium member or not. However, I hope to have a solution soon where Premium Members will be able to go to a different URL and if they are a member it will show the feed.

Hi Michael, sounds good! To encourage development, I subscribed on a year plan

btw, ads in my current feed did disappear! although the current feed with short excerpts isn't that useful of course (or better: full text would be so much better, maybe still capped when it is a very long article).

greets
matthias

Comment

RSS itself is just an XML format for which news is delivered. The RSS is generated by PHP and that's where there would be a check to see if there is a Phoronix Forums log-in session or if something else is set.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at - unless the app retrieving the feed is the user's web browser, there's nothing to link a forum cookie with the news app. You could link it by IP address (like many private bittorrent trackers do), but that would authenticate everyone behind a NAT, and it still doesn't cover external news aggregators like Bloglines. The only way to cover that would be to serve the actual ads yourself via a script that doesn't serve anything if the user is logged in.

Or you could use some sort of per-user GET authentication in the URL, but that's basically plaintext and could easily leak inadvertently.

Comment

Yeah, that's what I was getting at - unless the app retrieving the feed is the user's web browser, there's nothing to link a forum cookie with the news app. You could link it by IP address (like many private bittorrent trackers do), but that would authenticate everyone behind a NAT, and it still doesn't cover external news aggregators like Bloglines. The only way to cover that would be to serve the actual ads yourself via a script that doesn't serve anything if the user is logged in.

Or you could use some sort of per-user GET authentication in the URL, but that's basically plaintext and could easily leak inadvertently.

Yeah, the cookie authentication would only work if the user kept their RSS feed in the web browser.